Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library – Newshttp://www.bates.edu/news
Thu, 22 Feb 2018 03:36:19 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.5Video: Watch ski jumping off Mount David in 1936http://www.bates.edu/news/2018/02/21/video-ski-jumping-off-mount-david-in-the-1930s/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2018/02/21/video-ski-jumping-off-mount-david-in-the-1930s/#respondWed, 21 Feb 2018 19:51:27 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=113399The spectacle of ski jumping from Mount David in 1936 was no less grand, or less popular, than the Olympic version. ]]>

Ski jumpers at the Olympics travel hundreds of feet; students who launched themselves from the modest jump at the base of Mount David in the 1930s flew far fewer feet.

Still, the spectacle was no less grand, or less popular, judging from the crowds who gathered between Cheney House and the President’s House to watch these jumpers. These clips, from the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, are from the 1936 Winter Carnival.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2018/02/21/video-ski-jumping-off-mount-david-in-the-1930s/feed/0Look What We Found: Jakub Kazecki’s 1905 Bates German Club medalhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2017/10/07/look-what-we-found-jakub-kazeckis-german-pin/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/10/07/look-what-we-found-jakub-kazeckis-german-pin/#respondSat, 07 Oct 2017 15:45:01 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=110340“Students graduate and start their lives." But there are material things that will "bring them back to Bates and create a Bates identity.”]]>

Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki plucks a tiny bronze medal from a shelf in his Roger Williams Hall office. The medal, says the Polish-born scholar, is a symbolic “connection between the German and the American” — and between Bates students and the wider world.

In July 2016, a Virginia woman, Cecilia Mittmann, wrote Kazecki saying she’d found a medal at an estate sale in Alexandria. Might the Bates scholar have information about it?

Kazecki, an expert in 20th-century German literature (especially about World War I), dug through back issues of The Bates Student at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. He learned that the original Bates German Club, founded Oct. 12, 1905, produced these medals for its 16 members.

The inscription on one side of the medal reads, “Deutscher Verein zu Bates, 1905” (German Club of Bates), while the other presents a coat of arms adapted from the German empire, in which an eagle holds two symbols: one representing Bates, the other, an American flag.

Students founded the original Deutscher Verein “to give its members an opportunity to become better acquainted with German life and customs.” At its first meeting, on Jan. 18, 1906, the club initiated its charter members (men only) and elected officers. Professor of German Arthur Leonard was the club’s inaugural faculty adviser.

One side of a 1905 Bates German Club medal depicts the coat of arms adapted from that of the German empire, in which an eagle holds two symbols: one representing Bates, the other, an American flag. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

A story in The Bates Student describes a March 1, 1906, meeting at the Wood Street home of Leonard and his wife, who would accompany the students on the piano. Club business preceded socializing and refreshments, such as apples and popcorn balls. “German games were played, German songs were sung, and refreshments eaten in the German way,” the story said.

At later meetings, the club had guest speakers, such as German-born Alexander Maerze, Class of 1903, who in November 1906 regaled students for a full two hours with tales of crossing the ocean as a fourth-class steerage passenger.

When Kazecki shared what he had learned, Mittmann decided to donate the medal to the Bates German department. And for that Kazecki’s most grateful.

“Students stay here for four years and explore the world,” says Kazecki, who also researches images of German-Polish relationships in literature, film, and visual arts, as well as laughter and comedy in different media.

“They graduate and start their lives. But there are pieces of material culture that they have produced here that actually bring them back to Bates, and create a Bates identity.“

Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki holds a medal given to members of the Bates German Club. On this side of the medal an inscription reads, “Deutscher Verein Zu Bates” — German Club of Bates. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Kazecki likes to imagine how German Club students from the early 20th century looked at their medal often in the years after graduating and remembered the delightful meetings.

The medal also provides Kazecki’s own study and work at Bates with a little bit of institutional history. “I build my identity being here at Bates based on those pieces that I collect and gather in the office, as we all do,” says Kazecki, who advises today’s German Club. “And I think that is why it’s important to me. It’s part of my life now, and part of my own Bates identity.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/10/07/look-what-we-found-jakub-kazeckis-german-pin/feed/0How did Ed Muskie ’36 get baseballs signed by the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers?http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/05/05/ed-muskie-36-yankees-giants-dodgers-signed-baseballs/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/05/05/ed-muskie-36-yankees-giants-dodgers-signed-baseballs/#respondFri, 05 May 2017 12:00:06 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=107414The signed baseballs include Hall of Fame signatures of Jackie Robinson, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle.]]>

By the summer of 1956, the era of three Major League baseball teams in New York City was drawing to a close, which gives a wow factor to a collection of three signed baseballs once belonging to statesman Edmund Muskie ’36 and now held by the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Signed by players on the Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers, the balls were a gift from New York Gov. Averell Harriman to his fellow governors, including then-Maine Gov. Muskie, attending the annual governors conference in Atlantic City, N.J., in June 1956. The baseballs are now among the vast number of Muskie-related artifacts in the Bates archives.

A gift to then-Maine Gov. Edmund Muskie ’36 when he attended the 1956 Governors Conference, this baseball, one of three, is signed by members of the Brooklyn Dodgers, including Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson at top. (Josh Kuckens/Bates College)

Harriman’s gift-giving was reported by Sports Illustrated in the context of Harriman’s slow start in his bid for that year’s Democratic presidential nomination. “There are a lot of ball games being won in the ninth inning this year,” he told his fellow governors. (Harriman, however, would receive only 15 percent of the vote at the 1956 Democratic convention, losing to Adlai Stevenson.)

A year later, the Dodgers and Giants would both announce their moves to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively.

During the Governors Conference, Muskie played a bit of hardball. A roundtable on education saw the governors address exploding enrollments (due to the baby boom) plus teacher and classroom shortages.

Muskie suggested that in Maine, even with its “hard core of Yankee independence,” people were beginning to see “education as being a national problem.”

This baseball, once belonging to statesman Edmund Muskie ’36, is signed by the 1956 New York Yankees, including Yogi Berra (top) and Mickey Mantle. (Jay Burns/Bates College)

That brought rebukes from Southern governors, including Gov. Allan Shivers of Texas, who said that the states could handle education “more ably and at less cost.”

“Maine people have got enough guts.”

With his famed temper flaring a bit, Muskie countered that “I am not down here on behalf of the state of Maine to ask the state of Texas for anything. However, for anyone to seriously suggest that Maine is as well-able to meet these problems as a state like…Texas is to ignore the economic facts of life.”

Muskie assured the governors that “Maine people have got enough guts so that they will work to overcome the discrepancies and compete with people in other areas of the country” when it comes to educating the state’s children.

Still, he said, “we are talking here today about a national policy in the field of education. [I]f you want to realize the maximum value of Maine’s human resources, and the human resources of every other state, then you’ve got to think of the problem not in terms of your state’s ability to meet your problems, but the country’s ability to meet the problems of every one of the 48 states.”

This detail of the bluejay plate from The Birds of America shows what its creator called the “rogues” and “deceivers” of the bird world.

Bates gave special attention to the April 26 birthday of ornithologist, naturalist, and painter John James Audubon by wheeling out the library’s volume of Audubon’s masterpiece, The Birds of America, for rare public exhibition.

Birds of America is on display in Ladd Library through May.

Known as the “Bien” edition, after the chromolithographer responsible for the images, the volume is huge — 57 pounds, with each page measuring 39 1/8 inches by 26 1/8 inches. Its Bates provenance is equally outsized.

In fact, it belonged to Jonathan Y. Stanton, one of the college’s first professors and a major influence on Bates traditions and teaching from his appointment in 1863 until his death in 1918, after which his prodigious library was bequeathed to Bates.

A tour of the bluejay plate from Birds of America:

“When the Bates mission statement talks about ‘educating the whole person,’ it’s talking about formative teachers like Stanton,” says Pat Webber, director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Aside from Bates founder Oren Cheney himself, there was no more revered figure in the first century of the college than Stanton.

The centennial of his birth, for example, was a lavish affair, complete with a special edition of what was then called The Bates Alumnus, now Bates Magazine, as well as a series of observances at the 1934 Commencement.

“He was engaged with the whole campus and with everyone at Bates,” Webber says. “He was a polymath who taught Greek, Latin, ornithology. He founded Bates debate. He created the Freshman Ride — orientation, really — to help students learn about the area. He loved sports. He was the first librarian, and because of his fame as a birder, the Stanton Bird Club in Lewiston carries his name.”

Rarely quoted, and not one for the alumni club circuit, Stanton did speak at a Bates event in Hartford in 1909, and he opened with this telling remark: “I have not come here as a representative of the college, but to be with you, to see you, and to hear you.”

The Birds of America lands at Ladd library:

Moving Birds of America from its secure storage to public display on the library’s first floor was a two-step process. First came the distinctive display case, an early work by Thomas Moser, the famed cabinetmaker and former Bates rhetoric professor.

Then came the book, placed next to the library’s imposing portrait of Stanton himself. Webber, along with Laura Juraska, associate librarian for research services, handled the duties.

Among various Muskie remembrances this month was Muskie Archives director Pat Webber’s appearance on Maine public radio’s Maine Calling for “Remembering Ed Muskie.”

Here are six things to remember about Edmund Sixtus Muskie:

1. He was from a Maine family that was sending its first children to college

Edmund Muskie is at back left with his siblings and his mother, Josephine. (Photograph courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Ed Muskie was the son of Poland-born Stephen Marciszewski, who changed his name to Muskie when he emigrated to the U.S., and Josephine Cznarnecka, the daughter of a Polish-American family in Buffalo, N.Y.

Muskie’s father, a master tailor who owned a shop in Rumford, was outspoken in his support of Democratic Party ideology even though it conflicted with many of his customers’ Republican beliefs.

Muskie, then known as “Eddie,” lived in Roger Williams Hall and then in Parker Hall. He was president of his class, a standout debater, and graduated cum laude in 1936.

His honors thesis in history and government made two points: (1) the U.S. needed a comprehensive national system of social security, including health, unemployment and old-age insurance, and (2) the U.S. Constitution needed to be amended to give Congress the power to check the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, since the court had shown its propensity to strike down similar New Deal legislation earlier in the 1930s.

With the Depression a vivid reality, Muskie wrote that “the individual, without aid, cannot protect himself against the inevitable hazards which are his destiny as a member of our modern order.”

3. He revived Maine’s Democratic Party

Edmund Muskie won the Maine governorship in 1954 thanks to hard campaigning and support from savvy advisers like Frank Coffin ’40 (right). In this 1956 photo, the “Muskie Coffin” sign refers to Muskie’s reelection as governor and Coffin’s being chair of the Maine Democratic State Committee. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

In 1954, Maine Democrats were looking for a candidate to run for governor, and they recruited Muskie — but only after all other potential candidates declined.

A Democrat hadn’t been governor in nearly 20 years, and only one had been elected in the preceding 40 years.

Muskie was a weak candidate in more ways than one: He was still recovering from the physical and financial effects of a broken back suffered in 1953.

But Muskie won, thanks to hard campaigning, support from savvy advisers like Frank Coffin ’40 (above) and Don Nicoll, and an intimate knowledge of the state gained during his direction of the Office of Price Stabilization. The win gained national attention, and he appeared on a new morning TV show: NBC’s Today.

Although Maine remained a bastion of Republican politics through much of his career, Muskie nevertheless garnered 60 percent or more of the popular vote in each of his four senatorial elections.

4. He was called “Mr. Clean”

In this early 1960s image, U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36 and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, with an unidentified park ranger, visit Maine’s Cadillac Mountain. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Muskie was the grandfather of modern environmental legislation. As a senator, he sponsored both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which fundamentally established our federal government’s duties to preserve and protect the environment.

On the floor of the Senate after Muskie’s death in 1996, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, said that “because of the work of Ed Muskie, our children are growing up in a more healthy and beautiful America.”

5. He was targeted by Nixon’s “dirty tricks” in 1972

Popular memory holds that Muskie’s campaign collapsed after he allegedly teared up during a New Hampshire press conference, but the reasons are more complex, including dirty tricks by President Nixon’s Committee for the Reelection of the President. (Photograph courtesy of Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

A front-runner for the 1972 presidential nomination, Muskie and his campaign were targeted by Nixon’s Committee for the Reelection of the President and its program of “dirty tricks.” That included the so-called “Canuck Letter” — a forged letter published in the Manchester Union Leader that accused Muskie of making derogatory remarks about Maine’s French-Canadian citizens.

It is thought that Muskie’s campaign floundered in New Hampshire after he reportedly teared up while delivering a withering criticism of the conservative Union Leader, which hadpublished an unscrupulous attack on Muskie’s wife, Jane.

In her 2003 autobiography, Madeleine Albright, who worked for the 1972 Muskie campaign and later as a Senate staffer, said that “today a male politician who cried while defending his wife would probably go up in the polls.”

6. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom

In May 1980, Edmund Muskie ’36 is sworn in as U.S. secretary of state by his longtime friend and adviser, Frank Coffin ’40, a U.S. circuit judge at the time. Looking on are, from left, President Jimmy Carter; Muskie’s daughter, Ellen Muskie Allen; and his wife, Jane Muskie. (Bill Fitzpatrick/The White House, courtesy Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Years later, in his eulogy of Muskie, Carter said that of all the people he’d ever known, Muskie was the most qualified person to serve as president. However, he added, “I don’t believe that many presidents in history have contributed as much to the quality of life of people in our nation and around the world.”

Muskie once said that “there are only two types of politics. They are not radical or reactionary, or conservative and liberal, or even Democratic or Republican. They are only the politics of fear, and the politics of trust.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/03/27/muskie-100-birthday-six-things/feed/3Past is prologue, says new Muskie Archives director Pat Webberhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2012/08/08/webber-muskie-archives/
Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:00:09 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=57964The archives supports the academic community by keeping one foot in the past and one in the present.]]>

Pat Webber, newly appointed director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, poses in Riverside Cemetery near campus, where he leads an annual Bates history tour. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

For Pat Webber, becoming director of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates was in the cards.

As a boy, Webber recalls taking out his baseball card collection and scatter the dog-eared cards on the floor and sort them by the players’ last names.

Then he’d scatter the cards again, and sort them by team. And scatter again, and sort yet another way.

“I should’ve realized when I was 8 that I was going to be an archivist,” says Webber.

The college archivist since 2006, Webber was the Muskie Archives’ acting director this past academic year following the departure of Kat Stefko for a post at Duke University.

Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and college librarian, says that Webber’s appointment, following a national search, “reflects well on his training and experience. The Bates archives operations require archivists who are both innovative and committed to the user. Pat embodies and builds on this tradition.”

Wiemers adds that Webber is “an expert on Bates and Muskie history, and he has played a key role in promoting the use of the archives and special collections among students, faculty, staff and the general public.”

Webber came to Bates from the Special Collections Research Center of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., where he earned a master’s in public history in 2003. He earned a master’s in history from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001 and bachelor’s from the College of William & Mary in 1988.

In May 1980, Edmund Muskie ’36 is sworn in as secretary of state under President Carter (left) by Frank Coffin ’40 (right), chief judge of the 1st Circuit. Also looking on are his daughter Ellen Muskie Allen (second from left) and wife Jane Muskie (second from right). Photograph by Bill Fitzpatrick/White House, courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

As its name suggests, the archives’ centerpiece collection is the papers of Ed Muskie, 1936 Bates alumnus, U.S. senator, vice presidential and presidential candidate and secretary of state.

“For almost every issue of national importance during his time, you’re going to find some information in the Muskie Collection,” Webber says.

The archives has two other identities: It’s the official repository for college records (this was Webber’s area of focus prior to his appointment as director), and it also holds a diverse collection of rare books, oral histories, photographs and films, manuscript collections and other items.

Among the recently processed collections generating interest are the papers of Professor of Chemistry Walter Lawrance. As the state-appointed “river master” of the Androscoggin River from 1947 to 1978, he had legal power to control the amount of pollution discharged into the river by the three major paper mills located along it.

The papers of Bates chemistry professor and Androscoggin “river master” Walter Lawrance (right, in 1949) are now online. Photo courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

And as his card-collecting past suggests, Webber’s mission is to keep this complex collection of Bates history preserved, sensibly organized and accessible to today’s academic community.

For Webber and the archives staff, “accessible” has a proactive meaning.

Webber has taught or co-taught the history Short Term course “Introduction to Archives and Archival Science,” and he leads a popular tour of nearby Riverside Cemetery, the resting place of many early Bates leaders and professors.

“Every cemetery plot tells a story,” he says. “Language professor Benjamin Hayes and science professor Richard Stanley served Bates for a combined 64 years in the 1800s. Their friendship was likely very strong: Their families share a single plot.”

Webber says it’s important for the archives to keep one foot in the past and one in the present.

For example, students and professors who are curious about Bates’ inclusive history are always captivated by the college’s 1950s-era enrollment and career publications: one version for men and one for women.

“But they don’t just want to look at, say, When a Girl Goes to Bates in historical context,” Webber says. “They want to go beyond that and ask, ‘What does this say about Bates today?’ We’ve been inclusive for 150-plus years, but how has that really played out?”

The women’s dining room in Rand Hall, circa 1920. The archives supports faculty and students looking at how Bates’ inclusive ideals have played out in reality. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Webber recalls how Professor of History Margaret Creighton and her students took on that question. For her course “A Woman’s Place,” examining gender and geography in the U.S. from 1800 to today, students looked at dining at Bates, which was not coeducational until the 1960s.

From looking at historical materials, including articles in The Bates Student, “the project morphed from ‘Here’s where women used to eat, and here’s where men used to eat,’ into a discussion of the culture of Bates dining today, the politics of who sits where and that sort of thing,” Webber says.

Early in his career, Webber did archeological fieldwork, then worked in the geotechnical services field in the construction industry for nearly a decade. Then he switched to archival work. “I’ve gone from archeology to geology to archives, so at least I’m getting more modern,” he jokes.

]]>Scene Again: Classroom in the Skyhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2011/02/11/scene-again-1940-classroom-sky/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2011/02/11/scene-again-1940-classroom-sky/#respondFri, 11 Feb 2011 20:02:39 +0000http://home.bates.edu/?p=39984In 1940, the Civilian Pilot Training Program put Bates students in the air

Catherine Winne '41 poses in front of a Piper Cub in November 1940. Winne is believed to be the only Bates woman who learned to fly through the Civilian Pilot Training Program. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

From high in the sky, Maine looks like “a land of lakes, all within a stone’s throw of each other,” wrote Catherine Winne ’41 in the Oct. 30, 1940, issue of The Bates Student following her pilot training flight.

Winne is believed to be the only Bates woman who learned to fly through the government-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program. She’s seen here in November 1940 standing in front of the program’s training plane, a two-seat Piper Cub, at what is now the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport.

“We knew it was a pre-screening thing for military pilots.”

Begun in 1938 to increase the number of civilian U.S. pilots, the CPTP gave flight training to hundreds of thousands of men and women, mostly college students. The program is specifically credited with creating a path for African Americans to eventually become military pilots, notably the Tuskegee Airmen. Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, and UMaine offered chapters in Maine, as did several high schools and American Legion chapters.

Women were given 10 percent of the slots, which meant two spots among 20 at Bates, though they were excluded after the U.S. joined World War II. Winne, who died in 2007, was one female Bates trainee; the late Pauline Giles ’41 attended classroom sessions but it is unclear if she ever flew.

The CPTP’s military importance was readily known, especially after Germany invaded Poland and France. “We knew it was a pre-screening thing for military pilots,” says retired Marine Col. Armand Daddazio ’42, who was a CPTP trainee as a Bates student. After graduating, Daddazio saw active duty in air defense artillery in the Pacific.

He was on Tinian when the USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima. “Headquarters called to ask for officers for a work party,” Daddazio recalls. “We pointed out that officers don’t go on work parties. The reply was, ‘Well, they do on this one!’ For security, they wanted officers to unload the bomb.”

Now living in El Paso, Texas, after a career in financial services, Daddazio did not fly during or after the war. Initially interested in the Army Air Corps, he instead chose the Marines. “The casualty rate ended up pretty bad for the flying services,” he recalls. “Maybe the dear Lord didn’t want me to fly.” — HJB

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2011/02/11/an-open-book/feed/0Bound to Art reveals rare books in Bates collectionshttp://www.bates.edu/news/2011/01/03/bcma-bound2art/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2011/01/03/bcma-bound2art/#respondMon, 03 Jan 2011 19:50:21 +0000http://home.bates.edu/?p=39018Bound to Art is part of an 18-month celebration of the facility's 25th anniversary. The college's book collection ranges from incunabula of printing's infancy to the finely printed works of today's flourishing book arts movement.]]>

Displaying more than 40 rare books from the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Bound to Art: Illustrated Books from the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library is part of an 18-month celebration of the facility’s 25th anniversary. The college’s book collection ranges from incunabula of printing’s infancy to the finely printed works of today’s flourishing book arts movement.

The Bates College Museum of Art exhibition Bound to Art, the first-ever exhibit of these holdings, presents a selection of illustrated books spanning nearly 500 years. It will be accompanied by a full-color illustrated catalog, with photography and design by Will Ash of the Bates Imaging and Computing Center (catalog ordering information here).

The show opens with a 6 p.m. reception on Friday, Jan. 14, and ends March 25. In addition, Katherine Stefko, director of the archives and the curator of Bound to Art, leads an informal conversation about the exhibition at 6 p.m. Monday, March 7, at the museum.

“There’s a remarkable range of history, forms of illustration and subject matter, from religion to biology and from physics to poetry,” says Stefko. “There really is something for everyone.

“These books are delightful. They’re just lovely.”

She adds, “I realized, as I began preparing the exhibition, just how lucky Bates has been to receive several significant collections of illustrated books,” holdings that go back to a collection of natural history and biology books from “Uncle Johnny” Stanton, a member of the Bates faculty from 1863 to 1906.

Other collections came from Arthur Peaslee, an 1890 Bates graduate whose donation of more than 100 books included many relating to the Italian poet Dante and his Divine Comedy; and from John Lovejoy ’58, whose gift reflected his interest in contemporary books from small presses.

Authors represented in Bound to Art include poet John Ashbery, adventure novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, Chaucer, Coleridge, Dante, Frank O’ Hara, Ovid and Walt Whitman. Among the illustrators are Leonard Baskin, Gustave Doré and Marcel Duchamp. Maine artists, such as the late Martha Hall, are also represented.

One of the oldest books on display is a medical textbook from 1601 that shows the muscular structure of the larynx. “It made an incredible impact on the field of medicine,” says Stefko, “but it’s also regarded even today as one of the most beautiful medical textbooks ever published.”

Another highlight is Audubon’s Birds of America in the so-called Bien edition, named for its printer. This volume of stunning life-size prints is also called the “double elephant” edition, in reference to the paper size — about 30 by 40 inches — called by that term, which at one time was the largest that printers could accommodate.

Stefko also points to a four-volume set called The Poems, a 1960 collaboration between the New York School of poets and the second generation of Abstract Expressionist artists. Containing the only silkscreens that many of those artists ever made, the books were produced in a limited edition of 225 sets.

“To me, this is a great thing to be doing because so many people may not know that the Muskie Archives also possesses rare and fine-press books,” says museum director Dan Mills. “This exhibition will get the word out.”

Muskie, who gave the speech just prior to the bitter 1970 midterm elections, was taking on President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, who were blaming Democrats for the era’s urban violence and questioning their patriotism for opposing the Vietnam war. But Muskie “was appealing for more than votes,” Shribman writes. He was appealing for “a less pugilistic politics, and though he would have a distinguished Senate career and later serve as secretary of state, this may have been his finest hour.”

Said Muskie, “Our country is wounded and confused — but it is also charged with greatness and with the possibility of greatness. We cannot realize that possibility if we are afraid … or if we consume our energies in hostility and accusation.”